Re: House rules (was re: FMA rules?)

stiltman@teleport.com wrote:

>4.  Cloaking devices and missile magazines may not be targetted by
>needle beams, as they are considered internal systems.  They have to
>roll for these things on thresholds but they have no external
>components that can be targetted to knock them out.  (The original
>game-oriented reason for this was that cloak-capable ships take such
>a tradeoff to equip themselves with the things in the first place that
it >would be rather "cheap" for the opponent to be allowed to just
needle >the things out and cripple them so badly by destroying such a
costly >system.)

Considering how weak needle beams are, removing two of the rather few
worthwhile targets they have seems a bit harsh :-/
 
>5.  Nova cannons and wave guns do _not_ affect missiles, fighters,
>and cloaked ships in our games.  Our technobabble rationale for this
is >that a giant, hulking battleship wielding a fixed-emplacement gun
the >size of Tokyo simply isn't going to be able to aim it effectively
at darting >gnat-like fighters or ships that it can't see.

It is the area crisped by the Nova Cannon round which is the size of
Tokyo. If someone nukes Tokyo, I wouldn't give very much for the
survival chances of individual cars or motorbikes (corresponding to
fighters in this case) caught in the blast :-/

>7.  Needle weaponry may not target drives unless they are behind the
>enemy ship, and may not target "super guns" unless they are in front
of >the enemy ship.

See comment to 4 :-/

>8.  It isn't clarified in the main books well as to whether fighters
can fire
>upon one another outside of a dogfight context.

FT2 p.17: "If a Fighter Group is within range (6") of an enemy Group
[snip reference to fighter fire arc] then it may attack the enemy
Fighters excactly as it would an enemy warship, ..."

The next paragraf says: "If, however, the Groups are moved so that
their bases are actually TOUCHING, the two Groups may 'dogfight' ..."

To me it seems very clear that fighters can attack one another without
being involved in a dogfight.

[snip tactics]

The three important questions here are:

* Which movement system do you use?
* How big is your gaming table?
* How fast do you tend to fly?

>From the tactics and designs you describe I'd guess either at "Vector"
on the first *or* "rather small" and "slowly" on the second two
respectively - playing on a large table in Cinematic tends to give
higher speeds, and make short-range weapons rather weaker. Similarly
I've never found MT missiles to be a big worry in themselves in
high-speed battles; they tend to restrict the enemy maneuverability
somewhat, but that's about it.

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry